July 5, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 11 minutes

In last week’s entry here we touched on ‘bounce’ rates, and how having higher ones can be hugely problematic for any website that’s serving an e-commerce function. If you’ve got a basic WordPress site for your blog on a basic shared web hosting package then you won’t be particularly concerned if those who enter choose to exit shortly thereafter. If your site is the avenue by which you sell products and services and make a livelihood for yourself, it’s going to be a much bigger issue if this becomes a trend. Bounce rates are something that all conscientious web masters are going to monitor, even the ones who aren’t much of a master at all. We’re like any good Canadian web hosting provider in that we make these analytics resources available to people through our control panel, and most other providers will do the same so that it’s made easier to see if there’s some deficiency to your website that’s causing visitors to leave far too soon. We found an interesting resource that puts the importance of website load times in real perspective for people who might not get the magnitude of it otherwise, and we thought we should share that here today. 2 or 3 at Most The general consensus is that a website should load in less than 2 to 3 seconds, and more simply your website should load as fast as possible. Anything more than this time frame and your risk losing potential customers. There was a study done by Google in 2017 that indicated that as page load time goes from 1 second to 3, the likelihood of that visitor ‘bouncing’ increases by 32%. It’s very possible that these numbers will have increased by this point 4 years later. The reality is the longer your page takes to load, the more likely it is users will find that to be unacceptable. There’s no getting around the fact a fast user experience is extremely important. And even more so with the increasing predominance of mobile browsing. An analysis of 900,000 landing pages across several countries and industry sectors found that the majority of mobile sites are too...

June 28, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Anyone who has a website serving as the primary point of contact between their goods and / or services and paying customers is probably going to want that site functioning as optimally as possible. As it relates to sales and incoming revenue, that’s going to be even more important if it’s an e-commerce website and you are as profit oriented as the next guy or gal. Most people have a lot invested in their business, and $ is only a part of that investment. People will want to get the maximum return on that investment, and good website navigation is definitely a factor. We can relate to all of this here at 4GoodHosting, as being a quality Canadian web hosting provider we’re equally interested in returns on investments and we tend to have something of an affinity for anything digital. The fact you’re reading this means you’ve visited our website at least once, and we’ve put the same priority on solid website navigation that many others have to ensure we have as many new web hosting in Canada customers signing up with as possible. Yes, the lowest prices on reliable web hosting in Canada do the lion’s share of the work there for bringing new customers into the fold, but the design of the site is a factor just like it is for any e-commerce website where you want to be retaining customers and making sure as few as possible become ‘bounce rate’ statistics. Orders Up, Bouncers Down So we’ll refer to those people who leave a website shortly after arriving as ‘bouncers’ then, with absolutely no relation to the huge man who’ll throw you out of the club if you get out of line in there. These people usually bounce because the website is a) visually unappealing to them to the point it suggest a lack of professionalism for the business, or b) the way they’re able to move through the site’s pages isn’t what they like. Fortunately very little of the ‘like’ part of the equation has little to do with personal preferences or anything else of the sort. It has more to do with their inherent belief...

June 21, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Trends are trends, and the reason there’s often no stopping trends is because there’s a darn good reason everyone’s doing whatever it is. These days one such trend that’s got solid legitimacy behind it is moving from an on-premises Microsoft Exchange deployment to Exchange, and for most people it is nothing short of a huge undertaking. It’s often full of major issues along with considerations and decisions galore, and for a lot of people they won’t know what they’ve gotten into with moving to hosted Exchange until they’re well into the process. But you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and especially if it’s something you feel you need to do. I remember when I was very young and my grandfather said to me ‘some birds do, and some birds don’t. Some birds will, and some birds won’t.’ I had absolutely no idea what on earth he was talking about but I stared up into the sky anyways. The few birds I saw were flying around being birds like any other and I remember thinking what is it they would or wouldn’t be doing in the first place. But enough about that. Our discussion today is not necessarily about trends and about who is going to do what. It’s about getting your organization into Exchange Online and for some people it’s full of pitfalls that can make the whole thing far too unpleasant, especially if you have on choice but to continue on with it. So here’s what we know about what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do. Don’t underestimate the time required for moving the entirety of data over A whole bunch of factors can make this a lengthy ordeal. How many users do you have? How much data does each mailbox have stored? Do you have bandwidth constraints? The list can go on. Migrating email to the cloud can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks. In fact, Microsoft can contribute one major slowdown of their own – a less-obvious protective feature of Exchange Online makes it so that inbound sustained connections are throttled in order to prevent system overwhelm risk. A...

June 14, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Sharing the wealth is a pretty good rule to go by if you’re able to share it, and there’s been plenty of examples where if you don’t you end up with someone like Robin Hood who will share it for you. When it comes to the world of web development there’s never been any doubt about that, and that’s why source code is made available as open source as readily as it is. The widespread adoption has been of immense benefit to anyone who ‘builds’ anything worthy of mentioning for design and functionality. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any good Canadian web hosting provider in that there’s some of us around here that speak Programmer, but there’s others that don’t speak it at all and that’s alright. Some weeks our entries here may be a little bit more digestible for the less web-savvy of you all, but this likely isn’t going to be one of them. If you’re a coder or if your someone who can appreciate what web development is doing for marketing and promotion capacities for your business then this is something that will be of interest. Adopting new business strategies or implementing new technology is a proven effective way to grow and compete more effectively. More and more regularly it’s open source technology being tabbed as some seek a competitive edge and more of the latest innovations. A published survey not long ago found that 85% of enterprises reported using open source in their organization and in simple numbers adoption of the software really taken off over the last year. Almost half of these same teams are looking to rely more on open source in response to everything that’s changed (and they’ve learned) over the course of the COVID pandemic. The Right Fit Now You will be challenged to find anything around us that is NOT powered by open source today, from mobile phones to household appliances and more. Being able to build on the existing foundation of technology and not be hampered in making use of what you can to build your expansion on it is what open source is all about . Open source and...

June 7, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 4 minutes

No one needs to hear how Malware has become such more sophisticated and far-reaching nowadays, as the topics been beaten to death and everyone knows that cyber security experts are hard pressed to keep pace with them. Well, here we go again with one of the more menacing ones to come out of the void in more recent years. That’s Siloscape, named that way because this is malware that’s primary aim is to escape the container, and what better way than up and out. To get technical, Siloscape is a heavily obfuscated malware built to open a backdoor into poorly configured Kubernetes clusters and then run malicious containers to go along with other sneaky and up-to-no-good activities. If an entire cluster is compromised the attacker gets served sensitive information like credentials, confidential files, or even entire databases hosted in the cluster. Experts are semi-jokingly comparing this to the novel coronavirus, as this malware bug is pretty darn novel in itself as there’s really nothing been like it before and that’s why it’s generating fanfare. Unlikely to be as calamitous in the big picture as this darn pandemic though, which is a good thing. All of this stuff tends to be fascinating enough for those of us here like it would be for any Canadian web hosting provider. Nature of the business and all, and while we have a formative understanding of web security practices there’s no one here who’d be able to pull up the drawbridge in any situation like this. So let’s have a look at his Siloscape malware and lay out what you might need to know if you’re your own cyber security expert. Cluster Buster For anyone who might not know, the reason this is as serious as it is is because Kubernetes is one of the most popular open-source applications around, and for good reason. Containers have been wonderful and that’s why it’s unfortunate Siloscape is engineered to do what it does. So many organizations moving into the club are using Kubernetes clusters as their development and testing environments, and the threat of software supply chain attacks has to be seen as a huge threat. Compromising...

May 31, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Managing something usually has the context of getting greater productivity out of whatever it is. So if it’s always a plus, does that apply to managed web hosting the same way? The appeal is easy to see, and if you don’t know what managed hosting is it’s where the web hosting provider manages the system for you. As you’d expect, that means additional cost for the client but many businesses and ventures will come to see that as money well spent. This is particularly true if time and manpower aren’t resources you have in abundance and you need to focus more on content rather than workings of the site. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other quality Canadian web hosting provider in that what we do makes us fairly knowledgeable on matter like this one. While we think managed web hosting is great for some people, we also feel that with a little bit of self-initiative paired with ease of use offered by cPanel standard with our web hosting packages that you can be fairly productive on your own. That likely won’t be true for those operating larger e-commerce websites but for anyone that’s – for example – selling their pottery online or something similar you’d be surprised how proactive you can be. So that’s what we’re going to do with our entry this week, look at what’s good about managed web hosting and also looking at what’s not so good about it. Pros of Managed Hosting Being successful and / or profitable with website can take up a lot of time and effort, and primarily for content updates, design tweaks, and digital marketing activity. When you add ongoing technical maintenance on top of that, it can be overwhelming for some and especially if you’re the type who’s a webmaster in title while not being particularly web savvy in the first place. Everyone needs to start somewhere though. The advantage of managed hosting is how it lets you focus on the specifics of your business without additional worries of any sort related to site performance or security. E-commerce merchants will always need speedy loading times but often won’t have the...

May 24, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

We’ve been pretty emphatic with promoting virtual private servers here over the years, and nothing has changed with how they’re a much better choice for websites that need more bandwidth and performance resources at their disposal. That’s not going to be the scenario for the vast majority of people having their websites hosted, and every one of those guys and gals will be just fine paying as little as possible for web hosting by going with a shared hosting plan. It’s especially the best choice for anyone whose site is simply a blog. One of the things that makes us a top Canadian web hosting provider is the way we are able to pivot and turn with industry trends, and that’s what we’ll be doing with one of the more promising ones these days. VPS continue to be a good option, but now VDS servers are the even better choice for a lot of people who made the move to VPS a while ago. VPS is virtual private server while VDS is virtual dedicated server. So what’s the difference and what makes VDS better for some? That’s what we’ll look at with this week’s entry. Bare Metal Alternative for Bigger Boys Most people that have their website as a primary resource for e-commerce interests are going to operating it on behalf on some business. Not surprising that bigger businesses will have bigger websites and ones that have plenty of size and dynamic content components as compared to what the average website on shared hosting is going to have. These people needed powerful servers with predictable performance and for many years that meant going with a bare metal server. But now it’s changed to be that a VDS server is a better option when dedicated resources are needed. Previously you would probably rent a bare metal server and have it collocated it in a data center. The problem here is that the server is not going to scalable, and the bare metal servers have always tended to be expensive to maintain. So Why VDS? Change became possible when hypervisor technologies started making it so that multiple virtual machines could be run...

May 17, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The past 3 years or so in the world of cybersecurity have really made clear that hackers have expanded their reach and capability in a big way over that time, and it’s fair to say that cyber security interests have struggled to keep pace in protecting digital interests from being hacked into. The single individual doesn’t have as much to worry about when it comes to being hacked as a business or large enterprise does, but that doesn’t mean that they should be unconcerned. Here at 4GoodHosting we’re like any other good Canadian web hosting provider in that making sure our servers are as secure as possible, but when also know that we’ve got it pretty good in comparison to some others who have way, way more in the way of data that needs to be protected. Researchers have been stepping up their efforts to keep hackers more in check, and that’s a very good thing. Specifically what’s happened recently is they’ve found a way to use chaos to help create digital fingerprints for electronic devices that may be so thoroughly unique that even the most sophisticated hackers can’t get past them. And that’s based on just the sheer volume of possible combinations that will be possible meaning it would take an incomprehensibly long time to go through and try every one of them. How long? Well, we’ll get to that as we move further into discussing this very interesting development in web security. That Long! It’s believed that these Chaos fingerprints ahave so many layers of unique patterning to them that it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to test for every possible combination available. Behind all of this is an emerging technology called physically unclonable functions – PUFs - which are built into computer chips. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s possible that these new PUFs could possibly be used to create super-secure ID cards and reliably track goods in supply chains and as part of authentication applications. Ones where it is vital to know the individual you’re communicating or sharing information with is legit. The recent SolarWinds hack on the US Gov’t has...

May 10, 2021

Domain Related

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It’s been a while since we had an entry talking about the much-buzzed about topic of cryptocurrency, and it’s not like we’ll never have some new fold on the page with the stuff given how much uncertainty there still is about whether cryptocurrencies are ever going to assume the central role in globally unregulated currency that some people still adamantly insist they will. Given how much actual crypto mining is going on out there and the lengths people are going to in order to get in on the action suggests there’s still plenty of belief out there. Whether or not cryptocurrencies will be a legit option for paying for SaaS on PaaS products is something that might be of interest to a Canadian web hosting provider, and that definitely applies to us here at 4GoodHosting. Some say the real questions if Bitcoin are any cryptocurrency can ever be generated to the type of volume that would be needed to make it a legitimately exchanged currency. But like was said, the effort is definitely there to ‘obtain’ whatever there is to get out there, and the fact that there’s a criminal element in crypto mining furthers that fact even more. A tool is always needed, and for these crypto miner crooks their implement of-choice is crypto-jacking malware. It’s like hijacking but it’s not planes being intercepted, it’s cryptocurrency. But the good news is that tech giants are fighting back and making it so that it’s much more difficult to hijack someone’s else cryptocurrency who’s been mining it legitimately. Super Defender To get right down to it, what Microsoft is doing is integrating Intel Threat Detection Technology into Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and this revamped security product will help protect businesses from crypto-jacking malware. Up until now these crypto miners use only a small fraction of power depending on the device, so they often don’t end up on the radar of security teams. It’s only more recently that larger sums have been lost to crypto jackers who’ve found ways to do what they do much more effectively and greater reach that it’s become more of a priority for everyone, even though crypto...